A series of fatal attacks against French Jews is leading top community leaders to urge Jews against wearing the traditional kippa, a skullcap worn in public by Orthodox and other practicing Jewish men.
“Unfortunately for us, we are targeted,” Zvi Ammar, president of the Marseille Israelite Consistory, told AFP. “As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death.”
Ammar urged Jewish men and boys to refrain from wearing the kippa in public “until better days.”
“We have to hide ourselves a little bit,” adding that turning to such resolution made him “sick to the stomach.”
“Unfortunately for us, we are targeted.”
Zvi Ammar
Rabbi Haim Korsia, the chief rabbi of France, rejected the idea and told the AFP, “We should not give an inch, we should continue wearing the kippa.”
Roger Cukierman, the head of Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIP), the French umbrella council of Jewish organizations, agreed that the kippa should not be removed as that would reflect a “defeatist attitude.”
The call to remove the kippa came the day after a 35-year-old Benjamin Ansellem, a Jewish teacher wearing a kippa and carrying a Torah, was attacked by a terrorist in broad daylight. The 15-year-old assailant was identified as a Turkish Kurd who was a self-proclaimed devotee to the Islamic State and regarded by investigators as “self radicalised via the Internet.”
Ansellem had fallen to the ground after he was slashed in the shoulder and hand with a machete, using his Torah as a protective shield. Ansellem’s wife said he had already decided to remove his kippa “and encourages the community to do the same, not because he is afraid or ashamed to be Jewish, quite the contrary, but for security.”
Over the past couple of months, France has become a common target for ISIS attacks, a considerable number of them directed at Jews. Earlier in 2015, four Jews were slaughtered in a kosher Paris supermarket. In October, three Jews were attacked near a Marseilles synagogue. In November, an ISIS supporter stabbed another Jewish teacher in Marseilles.
Just this morning, a 73-year-old French Jewish politician Alain Ghozland was found stabbed to death in his apartment in France, according to the Jerusalem Post. Ghozland was described by the CRIF as “a prominent leader of the local Jewish community.”
After yesterday’s attack, the Elysee Palace said in a statement that there was “no doubt” the attack was anti-Semitic in nature and that French President Francoi Hollande would “assure the mobilization of public authorities to act with the greatest firmness against anti-Semitism and racism,” according to the Post.
Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that legal authorities now call such terrorists “unbalanced” as a politically correct cover or “euphemism” for their being anti-Semitic. Samuels urged authorities to investigate the family, schools, and mosque of yesterday’s assailant in Marseilles.
“The sheer repetition of incidents seems to have a numbing effect on public opinion, even more apparent in the wake of the indiscriminate Paris assaults that, last month, took more than 130 lives… The Jewish target becomes a lesser priority in the welter of generalized violence,” he said.
France’s Jewish community population—between 500,000 and 600,000 Jews according to the AFP—is the largest in Europe, and third largest in the world. 8,000 French Jews had reportedly left France for Israel in just 2015 alone.